Pushed past 80,000

The Lord loves a titanium hoarder. Sales of ore that I acquired pre-patch pushed me over the 80,000 mark yesterday. I only have 15-20 stacks left so that well will be drying up soon.

I did manage to level my enchant/JC alt to 30 yesterday. Small steps, yes, but steps FORWARD. That's the important thing.

The next benchmark I'll be looking at is 85,000 gold, but more importantly 85,900. Why? Because that number is almost exactly 40% of the gold cap. Can I get there this weekend? We shall see.

I spent 45 minutes crafting death knight glyphs this morning. Nine more classes to replenish. I haven't made glyphs in well over a week. My sales are going to take a dive if I don't do this soon.

To the next 5000 gold!

Somewhere above 75,000 gold

... but still below 80,000. The competition has returned to the glyph market, and my profits are decreasing because I've been slow to craft replacement glyphs for those that I've sold. I thought I would do that last night, but I wound up running the regular and heroic dailies for emblems. (Only 27 to go till I can buy my tier chest!) I have also run out of savage and tempered saronite gear to sell, so I've crafted that and listed it. Hopefully I'll come home to find that all of that has sold.

I'm in the middle of a giant experiment at work, one which will require me to be in from 8 am till midnight tomorrow (on Friday! I know, right!?) but I'm planning to use that as an excuse to not come in at all on Saturday. Once I finish my exercise (a fifteen mile run, ugh) I plan to sit down and power that little shammy up to level 35 and with that, his enchanting and jewelcrafting to 300. That will be a gold (and time) sink, but the JC/DE combo is so potent that it's worth my time to invest in this toon and get him to max level so that I can reach the cap more quickly.

I know I say that every time, but this time I'm pretty close to believing it. Till then, it's strictly glyphs and blacksmithing.

Barely past the 70,000 gold mark

This morning's glyph sales just pushed me beyond the 70,000 gold mark. Well, pushed me beyond it again, I should say; I was there last night and decided it was the right time to level my alts' professions. My JC is only 26 so he's now maxed out for jewelcrafting and enchanting at 225 apiece. (Of course, this came with a bit of heartbreak, including buying several stacks of Heavy Stone off the AH at 9g a pop ... curse the marvelous bastard who wrung that gold out of me!)

With that in mind, I have a tough choice ahead of me: do I suck it up and level the DK to 65 so I can have a maxed-out alchemist? Power the little guy up from level 26 to 35 to reach the next tiers of JC and enchanting? Farm old-world herbs and thorium ore on my 80s so they can get there cheaply? Or chase gear upgrades with my two 80s in the Trial of the Champion (regular and heroic)? The latter option would be appealing, but I spent Sunday running that dungeon eight times. I looked at the loot table and there are five drops in there for my paladin: 4 for my retribution set, and one upgrade for holy. My first piece of loot dropped on run #7: my holy trinket. Exactly what I didn't want! I shouldn't complain though; my friend who came on his hunter got zero pieces of relevant loot. Zero. In eight runs.

On the other hand, 70,000 gold! 1600 more and I'm a third of the way home!

Up over 65K (or: I LOVE PATCH 3.2)

I just deleted what was to be this post's original title: "I couldn't be happier with the results of this patch." That's just wrong; I could, of course, be happier about that. But as it stands, I'm pretty damn happy. In under six days I've added another 30,000 gold to my net worth, putting me a tad over 65,000 total. That means I'm more than a quarter of the way to my goal of hitting the gold cap. Exquisite!

I'm at work right now and I got here a bit later than I intended; someone pulled me into a PUG of the new five-man instance, Trial of the Champion, and while I was there the chest for my paladin dropped, which was excellent. Then my Northrend Inscription Research was up in 15 minutes so I spent some time doing a talent respec for the pally, and once again the RNG failed to give me the ability to make the Glyph of Obliterate. So I logged into my main banker to check how the Death Knight glyphs were doing and whether I should post some more before leaving (answer: yep!) and I noticed that the same person had purchased all of the titanium ore stacks that I'd put up for 330g. I whispered him to ask whether he wanted more at 325g a stack and he said yes. 21 stacks later I was looking at 6000g and depositing my riches in my guild bank! Worth the wait for sure, but now I'll probably be at work past 10. Them's the breaks.

I hope to make another 5000g tomorrow. Shouldn't be too tough; I've got a ton of herbs (at least 50 stacks) in my scribe's mailbox and, if I finish everything I need to tonight, I'll have basically the entire day to be logged in for undercutting purposes tomorrow while I take care of things around the house.

I hope 3.2 is filling your pockets! It's doing so beautifully for me!

The Patch 3.2 Profit Machine

Now that Patch 3.2 has gone live, it's time to cash in! And cash in I have; over the past two days I've seen my gold pile increase by some 12,000 (and that's after having bought close to 90 stacks of herbs for under 20g apiece).

Titanium ore is moving, but slowly and at a price I was hoping would be an absolute minimum (that is, double what I paid). Oddly, it's really only selling in stacks of 5; I've moved a few stacks of 10 and 20 but 5 is the size that gets it out of the AH and the gold into my pocket.

The real money is in glyphs, especially DK, paladin, and hunter glyphs. The first two I expected, considering DKs had all their talent points refunded and respecs were in the offing and one of the main ret paladin abilities (Seal of Blood/Vengeance) was removed from the game (and its glyph was changed), but all the hunter glyph sales surprised me. Maybe people really are logging on to those shelved alts and getting them glyphed.

It's not over yet, though. I'm going to lay low tonight -- hopefully run a bunch of heroics to FINALLY get to exalted with the Argent Crusade -- but you'd better believe I'm going to be crafting glyphs from every single ink I can make. The more Glyphs of Dancing Rune Weapon, Howling Blast, and Seal of Vengeance I can sell for 120g a pop, the better.

The Plan.

1. Gold making. Log in on all three glyph-posting bankers, cancel undercuts and all auctions at "medium" time left or lower, collect mail, post. If gold on hand reaches 1000 or more, mail it to the main banker. Log in to the scribe, do Northrend Inscription Research, make 5 of those glyphs, email them to the appropriate banker. If Savage Saronite sets and enchanting rods are sold, check that I have the mats on hand to make more. If not, do the usual AH run, which is: (a) saronite ore, (b) Icethorn, (c) Adder's Tongue, (d) cobalt if necessary, (e) price checks on abyss crystals and eternal belt buckles to see if they're worth listing. Craft plate pieces, mail them to the banker, list. Continue till the gold cap is reached, mail off 20K to my friend as a thank you for introducing me to WoW, continue till the gold cap again, and drastically reduce operations until I'm below 200K gold again. Possibly ruin the glyph market once I hit the cap by listing every glyph at 4g apiece when I log in.
2. Crusader title on the main. Currently an Exalted Champion of four different factions, but maintaining Valiant status with Ironforge in order to double up on the dailies. Will continue to do the following dailies until I'm exalted with the Argent Crusade (about 9000 reputation points to go until I hit that): A Valiant's Field Training, At the Enemy's Gates, Threat From Above, Battle Before the Citadel, Taking Battle to the Enemy. Skipping the weapon-fetching quest and anything involving jousting in a ring. Additionally, if there is time each day, I will try to run the Heroic daily while wearing the Argent Crusade tabard in order to speed up the march to Exalted. (After Patch 3.2 goes live, this will become a mandatory activity in order to gear up the Warlock for raiding and so that Emblems of Conquest and Triumph can be collected so I can be a "scrub running around in full 8.5.")
3. Level the DK to 68. I really ought to just mail him the cloth +10% XP shoulders that are languishing on my never-played priest and get on with this. He's at 58 right now, and in order to get an alchemy specialization he has to be 68, otherwise I'd just stop at 65 when he could max his skill. Still, since the DK is still an OP class, I should be working on this much more fastidiously at the current moment before the inevitable nerf, but establishing myself as a gold-maker has taken so much of my time that it's usually time to hit the hay before I can log in on him. I have no interest in playing the DK but starting at 55 is very appealing.
4. Level the shammy and his big money professions to maximum. Do I need another 80? Probably not. But I need a 77 to do that Damaged Necklace quest and if you're at 77, why not 80. Plus, it might be fun to smash face with a melee shammy in raid instances, and at the next boss drop back to heal. What I need to do is make a list of all the chokepoint ingredients for JC I need, and maybe send my paladin back to the Old World to grind out some mining (sigh) if things are too expensive.

Over 35K, but with a brief radio silence

35K bit the dust a short while back. Those saronite PVP sets from blacksmithing are such a gigantic profit every time they sell, and I've had a lot of buyers lately. Maybe people are gearing up their DKs and doing PVP to bide their time before 3.2 drops? I don't know.

However, I had a big weekend planned despite being on a trip, and naturally before I even got to the hotel my Blizzard Authenticator had managed to jump ship and I've been unable to log in for almost 72 hours. I'm planning to call Blizzard customer service as soon as they open up tomorrow and spend my lunch hour at home listing glyphs.

Also on the agenda is a port to Dalaran for all of my bank alts. I don't know why I haven't done this yet, it seems so simple; generally the alt who carries most of the gold hangs out in Stormwind and has his hearthstone set to Ironforge so that if a farmer comes on and wants to drop raw materials for cheap, he has a high probability of getting where he needs to be very quickly. But if patch 3.2 is coming on Tuesday as Boubouille seems to think it will, I'm going to want to log out Monday night in Dalaran right near the jewelcrafting trainer to more easily offload those stacks of titanium ore.

Finally, I'm nearing the end of the road with the stupid, silly Argent Tournament. My warlock is exalted with all of the Alliance cities save Ironforge, and he's 500 reputation away from that. He's now exalted with the Silver Covenant, and is just over 9000 points away from exalted with the Argent Crusade. I need to get the Crusader title and then I will likely focus on leveling my shammy (along with his jewelcrafting and enchanting) as soon as I can purchase the 10% experience heirloom chest.

Sadly, my original main, my beloved retribution paladin, will likely remain shelved in the coming weeks and possibly months. He'll basically function as my blacksmith and Smelter-In-Chief, a sad an inauspicious fate for a guy I played almost exclusively for months. He sits sullenly in Dalaran, remembering that April night when he downed 10 of the 14 bosses in Ulduar ... and then never went back in. Poor fellow.